Michael Wilmington

To cop a phrase, it's a knockout. [05 Sep 1999, p.32C]

German emigre Dupont directs all this with the style, flair and tension he brought to his 1925 Emil Jannings classic, "Variety." But it is Wong, shimmering with charisma, who gives Piccadilly its unforgettable center.

Not a striking film visually. It's deliberately plain looking, focused on the appalling events with an almost documentary immediacy.

It's a thriller that comes at you with gut-clutching ferocity, spewing blood and sex, shaking you up and scrambling your responses.

Not too many actors last year bettered or equaled Beatty and Schreiber here, separately or (better yet) together. It's a pleasure and a privilege to watch them work.

This is an old-fashioned movie done with wit, grace, smarts and style. [19 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

My Sex Life . . .," one of the best and smartest French comedies in several years, is an epic voyage into paralysis and confusion among the educated young: a witty, brilliantly observed descent into the maelstrom of the modern Groves of Academe.

This richly remembered tale of Christmas past, with writer Jean Shepherd recalling the days when a Red Ryder BB gun really meant something, is already something of a Christmas perennial.

Prototypical DeMille extravaganza about a circus tour beset with colorful crises, romance, train wrecks and spectacular melodrama from beginning to end. [21 Aug 1998, p.H]

The first-rate cast, Lee Garmes' camerawork and the tense, excellent script (by Phil Yordan and, uncredited, Dashiell Hammett), all help build toward an unsurprising but memorable climax. [16 Oct 1996, p.2]

This is perhaps the quintessential stiff-upper-lip homefront drama, with Minivers Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon at their noblest, Teresa Wright at her most adolescently angelic and assorted English-Hollywood expatriates (Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Peter Lawford) at their hardiest. [11 Oct 1996, p.J]

As much fun as anything director/co-writer Jane Campion has ever filmed. Holy Smoke lets it all hang out.

The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.

A bittersweet comedy about the great sleuth's great love and the one case he couldn't handle. [07 Jan 2000, p.L]

It's a twisty, hell-for-leather crime thriller, and director Carl Franklin gives it all the slick, modern trimmings.

One of the more delightful and satisfying family movies.

Ends up working like a charm.

Works better and cuts deeper than the mostly fictionalized "Hoosiers."

At its worst, Limbo is ersatz Conrad. But at its best, the film makes us feel that uncertainty and darkness, casting us into the cul-de-sac of modern life and love. [04 Jun 1999, p.A]

Something to Talk About, which is something to see, makes us a delectable present of its own bright, brawling little world: wisecracks, venomous Charity Leagues, horse shows, last dances, skeleton-filled closets and all. [4 Aug 1995, p.C2]

In The Hudsucker Proxy, the filmmaking Coen brothers make dark, startling, wittily extravagant sport of the American Dream. The movie is opulent and wry, a bitingly intelligent fable about business and romance. [25 Mar 1994, p.A]

Like a Bach toccata or a frosty drink on a sunlit veranda, a first-class movie spy thriller can offer one of life's cooler, more elegant treats. The Tailor of Panama fits that category.

Somewhat illogical but full of terrifyingly sustained sado-masochistic emotion. [05 Dec 1997, p.L]

An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

Hitchcock's glossier and more complex remake of his classic 1934 spy thriller, with James Stewart and Doris Day as the average American couple caught in a whirlwind of intrigue and terror. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

It's a powerhouse, demanding film that sometimes stretches the limits of credibility. But it's done with such consistent technical brilliance--and with such a first-rate cast and company.

There's a gentleness and open-mindedness in that touch and throughout the film that's a little at odds with the shallower script. But, in the end, that humanity pays. [27 Dec 1996]

A violent, improbable movie done in tersely elegant style, and it may be the last action movie for one of the cinema's great action stars, Clint Eastwood.